Open Our Eyes, Lord!

There are way too many English Bible translations and way too many people claiming – as in this case – to have the one true guide to its interpretation.

These are the stars that I sail by when I evaluate a Bible version or guide.

Fortunately, one new publication, The Pure Word – New Testament (TPW), has made my job simple: the TPW, far from helping the Bible student, in fact takes the reader farther away from the plain sense of scripture. This is why my thoughts in this article will seem brusque and more black-and-white than usual.

Part One: What is “The Pure Word”?

What they claim to do and what they have actually done are two different things. They claim to have (at long last!) gone back to the original Greek to produce the perfect and pure paraphrase of the King James Version, one which they imply will take away the misunderstandings in the Christian church to evaporate! [see their video on their page] So Arminians and Calvinists, Baptists and Pentecostals will finally be able to see the light and shake hands all around!

Let the buyer beware of claims that a new key has finally, after 2000 years, unlocked the true hidden meaning of the Bible. That is why my stomach clenched when the first thing I saw was “The Pure Word is an unprecedented New Testament resource, over 20-years in the making, that reveals the original Koine-Greek depths-of-meaning from the time of Christ…[allowing the reader to] experience deeper scriptural meaning that has never before been achievable in English.” Oh, and their claim that all, 100%, of Bible translations are “riddled with inaccuracies that never referenced the original Greek scriptures” and “incredibly rarely did they ever go back and look at even of the few original Greek words. Never mind this project which took over 20 years and a major scholarly group looking at every single word in the Greek.”

This last statement is either incredible hubris or simply a complete lack of awareness of what English Bible translators have been doing in the original languages for the past 500 years! (more…)